The Tally

You count in twenties.

Not because it is efficient — it is not especially — but because a flock does not present itself in ones. It presents in clots and surges, and a man standing at a gate counting individual animals will lose his place inside forty seconds and will not know that he has.

So you count in twenties. Yan, tan, tethera. Or you use a stone, or a notch, or in Rhodri's case a length of bailer twine with knots in it, because his grandfather used bailer twine and there has never been a reason to stop.

Four hundred and eleven went up in May.

The first count

Four hundred and nine.

This is nothing. Two out of four hundred and eleven over a summer on that ground is a good result and Rhodri would have signed for it in May. Ewes die on a hill. They get cast, they get stuck, they get old at inconvenient moments.

He counted again the following morning because the twine had come loose and he was not confident.

The second count

Four hundred and thirteen.

That is not a small discrepancy in the wrong direction. That is four out from the first count and two above what went up, and the only ways to be above are a neighbour's stock coming in — which happens, and which is a conversation — or a miscount.

Rhodri assumed a miscount. It was the reasonable assumption and he made it without difficulty.

The third count

He did it properly. Two days later, in the pens, running them through the race in twenties, with his daughter on the gate and a clicker as well as the twine.

Four hundred and eleven.

Which is correct, which is the number that went up, and which should have been the end of it.

Why it was not the end of it

Because of the eleven.

When you run four hundred sheep through a race you see them. Not as a flock — individually, for about a second each, at close quarters, and a man who has done this for thirty-one years knows his own stock in a way that does not survive being written down.

Rhodri did not know eleven of them.

Not did not recognise — he cannot claim to recognise four hundred and eleven ewes and would call anyone who claimed that a liar. He means something narrower and harder to argue with: eleven animals came through the race and each one of them, individually, produced in him the small wrong-note feeling of a thing that does not belong.

They were the right breed. They were the right age. Nine of them carried his mark and two carried a mark he did not know, which is ordinary and is a phone call.

He made the phone call. Ivor at Blaen-y-Cwm had lost two in June and was glad to have them back and came for them on the Sunday and that was that.

Which left nine.

The nine

They carry his mark. The mark is his and has been his family's since 1911 and is registered.

He does not know them.

He has looked at them every day since August. He has had them in the near field where he can see them from the kitchen. He has checked the ear tags, which are his, from his own batch, purchased in 2021, in sequence with the rest.

Everything about these nine animals says they are his and have been his for four years.

What his daughter thinks

Cerys is twenty-six and does the paperwork and has a degree in agriculture and has been extremely patient.

She thinks he miscounted in May.

She has walked him through it. Four hundred and eleven was itself a count, done in a rush on a wet morning by one man with a piece of twine. If the true figure was four hundred and twenty and he counted four hundred and eleven, then everything since is explained: the 409, the 413, the 411, and nine animals he does not know because nine animals were up there all along and he had lost track of them in the spring.

It is a complete explanation. It requires only that he was wrong once, in May, by nine, on a wet morning, at fifty-eight years of age.

What Rhodri thinks

He thinks Cerys is probably right.

He has said so, out loud, twice.

He has also, since September, been counting the flock every single morning.

Not in twenties. Individually, in the near field, by hand, before the light is properly up, at four hundred and eleven a time, which takes about forty minutes and which he has done eighty-one consecutive days.

Cerys has watched him from the kitchen window most of those mornings.

She has not said anything, because she does not know what the sentence would be, and because on the fourth of October the number came out at four hundred and twelve, and she checked it herself twice, and got four hundred and eleven both times, and has not told him.